Things in Glocca Morra

by Peter Collier

  Jack finally got his hands around her waist and lifted her slightly so that her feet flailed in the air before he set her down again.

  The male bum was silent, but the female revived and began to spit incoherent insults at us.

  Taking two steps back, Val stood with feet apart and tore open her trench coat, holding its sides out with both hands like an angel unfurling its wings. She was naked underneath and cried out like a coloratura as she flashed the fullness of her glory. Both bums cowered with their arms up over their faces as if witnessing the transfiguration.

  She pulled the coat back around her and recinched the belt, then took off for the funicular. Jack and I hurried after her, fearing what came next. But she entered the car of the funicular and sat there listlessly as we began to slant downward to Hill Street. Watching her, I could see that she had rubbed her basic being just as raw as the spot on her arm.

  Val quickly ran inside when we got back to the house. She had thrown off the trench coat and was waiting for Jack when we entered. Her naked body locked onto him as if magnetized; her face was flushed and feral when she grabbed the back of his head and gave him such a carnivorous kiss that I half expected to see him come away bleeding from the mouth. Then she seized his hand and jerked him toward the bedroom so hard that he stumbled along the way.

  The noises she made penetrated the shut door; they were so coarse and carnal that I went outside and sat on the deck.

  When I came back inside an hour later, they were quiet.

  I tried to go to sleep myself, but the events of the evening wouldn’t let go. I was still awake at 2:15 when Val emerged from the darkness of the bedroom, now wearing underclothes. She padded to the bay window and looked out enigmatically, as she had so often in the past weeks. The full moon showed her high color and her luxurious hair, gathered into a bun that was already collapsing. Her disregard for how she looked only heightened her wild beauty.

  Assuming that I was asleep, she tiptoed to the bathroom and tried to close the door without making noise. A narrow band of light escaped from beneath the jamb, and I heard a jet of urine hit the bowl. When she came out and saw that I was awake and watching, she sat down on the chair opposite me, not bothering to close her legs.

  “One thing I forgot to say about heaven when we were talking tonight,” she spoke in a thickened voice. “Because heaven is here and now, you understand that when we die we don’t go to heaven, we leave it.”

  After sitting silently for a while, she stood up purposefully, picked up her trench coat and draped it around herself, grabbed the Zephyr’s keys from the kitchen and walked out the door. I heard the car start and then she drove off into the darkest part of the night.

  TWENTY

  The next morning Jack called her apartment several times, but there was no answer.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” he said feebly.

  I stepped out onto the deck so he wouldn’t see the sadness that had seized me. But the wind coming off the ocean was cold enough to shatter glass, and I came back inside after a few minutes.

  By then, he was in his room extracting his dresser drawers one by one and dumping out the clothes on his bed next to his open suitcase. He had turned to the things hanging in his closet when the phone rang. Dropping everything, he ran out to get it.

  “Hello? Hello? …” he pressed the receiver to his ear and listened intently. “Val?”

  “Was it her?” I asked when he hung up.

  “I’m not sure it was anyone,” he was baffled. “It might have been just a whisper or maybe static on the line. But it could have been that construction noise outside her place in the background.”

  He dialed Temple Rose’s number but got no answer. He managed to get ahold of a production assistant director at Warners, who told him that the major filming for Tomorrow had been done for over a week and they hadn’t seen Val since the wrap party.

  He tried her apartment again, his face falling with each unanswered ring.

  He started to sag, but made an effort to rouse himself. “We’ve got to try to find her. She was wonderful last night but also very weird. God knows what’s going on.”

  Because she had taken the Zephyr, we had to call a cab. I didn’t move fast enough for Jack when it arrived.

  “You can stay here and listen to these goddamn waves flopping in all day if you want,” he snapped, “but I’m going to find Val.”

  On the way to Toluca Lake, he spoke only once: “Today is November 3rd, two months to the day since we first saw her at the party.”

  We found the Zephyr parked on the street in front of Val’s apartment building, keys in the ignition, surrounded by construction vehicles and equipment. Jack knocked on her door several times and put his finger on the buzzer for a long burst. Then he tried the knob. It was unlocked and we entered.

  He called out her name. The place felt so uninhabited that I half expected an echo.

  “Look!” He picked up an envelope from the coffee table with Gianni scrawled on the front. It had been sealed and then opened and now had nothing in it.

  He opened the bedroom door and started to enter but then staggered back suddenly as if hit by a powerful blast of air, almost falling into me. I held his shoulders and peeked around him and saw Val’s naked body on the bed. Her face was nesting in her raven hair like an infertile egg; she was watching infinity. Looking exsanguinated, she was on her back with ankles crossed, one arm pillowing her head and the other casually grasping a wrinkle in the covers at her side: a lifeless odalisque.

  Jack gripped the door jamb to steady himself while I went to check for a pulse.

  Death was already staking its claim—her body heading toward room temperature; her facial muscles setting; her eyes turned to isinglass. She was a study in subtraction—the glove with the hand withdrawn—but still so perfectly sexual that I had to jam a hand into my pants pocket to quell the stirrings of an erection.

  A pharmacist’s vial was trapped in the shadow of her underarm, the cap off and a dozen or so tiny pills arranged almost artfully around it. I bent down to look closer and saw the prescription for phenobarbital on the label.

  I tried to close her eyelids the way I had so often seen people do it in the movies, but they popped open again as if on springs, the dark pools of the irises as deep as forever. I noticed a thumbtack-sized bruise on her neck and a tiny crust of blood at the corner of her mouth.

  Jack tried to come close too, but he couldn’t stand the sight of her and turned to slide down the side of the bed onto the floor.

  “We need to call someone.”

  “Your father?”

  He looked at me like I was daft.

  I went to the living room, got the operator on the phone and told her what had happened, then returned to look again at the still life of Val’s body, awed by the magnitude of the journey she had undertaken.

  Why had she come to this place to die? And why so utterly alone? And what had the note removed from the envelope said?

  I found a bedspread on the shelf of the closet and covered her.

  Still sitting on the floor with his back against the side of her mattress, Jack reached for one of Val’s dead hands and put it on the top of his head, holding it there with both of his like a young chimp seeking grooming. And for the only time in all the years I knew him—through all the operations and pain and family tragedy—he began to cry.

  I walked back into the living room to give him privacy. Looking around, I was struck by how orderly the place was, odd given that Val, like Jack, had cultivated disorganization.

  We heard sirens when they were still blocks away.

  The cop car beat the ambulance.

  “Police,” a voice called out from the doorway before a cop entered with his hand hovering over his service revolver. He was a large man with sad eyes and a big nose and a gentle pachyderm manner.

  “Officer Mike William,” he identified himself, “LA County Sheriff’s.”

  “Williams?” I thought I misheard
him.

  “No, William singular.”

  I led him to the bedroom and peeled back the spread from Val’s body. After putting two fingertips on her carotid, he took a pencil out of his breast pocket and used it to prod at the pills under her arm. Then he stood back, his head swaying in a slow negative that radiated genuine sadness.

  “Jesus. Just look at her. Why does a beautiful woman like that want to go and do something like this for?”

  Still sitting on the floor holding Val’s hand, Jack spoke in a small voice: “Lem says there’s a little blood on her mouth.”

  “And a tiny bruise on her neck,” I added.

  “Looks like a hickey,” the cop said, giving it a cursory glance.

  He saw Jack droop, and quickly knelt to pat his shoulder with guilty sympathy.

  “Sorry. That was dumb of me. I guess I’ve seen too many of these things. After a while your ability to feel properly gets out of whack.”

  The cop and I stood there for a minute, unable to keep our eyes off her. The necrophilia finally became so palpable that he covered her again with the bedspread.

  “Maybe you should look for fingerprints,” Jack said.

  The cop went down on his haunches again to be level with him. “I don’t have that equipment,” he said almost tenderly. “And hers would probably be the only ones anyway. But the coroner will take a look and let us know if there’s anything suspicious.”

  By then the ambulance attendants had entered with all their apparatus and were waving us out of the room so they could begin milling around the bed and preparing to cart out the remains.

  I felt like my heart had been pulled out by the roots.

  TWENTY-ONE

  It was dark when we got home. Jack went to his room and crawled into bed fully clothed, including his dress shoes. He didn’t get up until after one o’clock the next day, when he shambled into the kitchen wearing a cardigan sweater over his crumpled clothes. He had misaligned the buttons and seemed to be tilting.

  Without saying a word, he sat down at the table and began pounding on his Underwood with his face close to the keys, inserting paper and ripping it out every minute or two so forcefully that the roller whined liked a reel with a trout on the line. He wadded up the used sheets violently and threw them onto the growing mound in the corner of the room.

  I asked him what he was trying to write.

  “I’m just trying to get my memories of her down,” he said frantically. “Everything I can think of, before it all goes away. But I can’t get her words and the way her mind worked. I can’t get the way she looked, the way she felt, the way she molded to me. If I had it as a writer I would be able to do this.”

  He hadn’t eaten in twenty-four hours. He had raccoon eyes and his face was gaunt, looking like he was slightly sucking in his cheeks.

  After staring hopelessly at the typewriter for a couple of minutes more, he stood up and staggered back to bed.

  He was still there the next morning when the Old Man entered the house, looking around carefully before asking how Jack was.

  “See for yourself.” I gestured toward the bedroom.

  He went in and shut the door. I could hear his voice badgering, cajoling, commanding, without any response.

  Finally he emerged, shaking his head. “I got him to take off his shoes and get rid of that goddamn sweater, but that’s about it. I’ve never seen him like this before, even when he was a sickly kid. I’m worried. He’s just barely there.”

  By the time he left, he was issuing orders again: “Listen, you need to get him on his feet as soon as possible. Get some food into him and get him thinking straight. We need to head back to Hyannis so we can get everything back to normal and start moving ahead. I’m counting on you to do whatever is necessary.”

  A couple of hours after the Old Man left, Officer William showed up, his hangdog look still radiating gloom. I rousted Jack and he came into the kitchen in his underwear and house slippers.

  The cop noticed his dog tags. “I tried to enlist in the Army, Marines, Navy and Coast Guard. None of them would take me, not even the Merchant Marine, because I’ve got a big goddamn hole in my ear drum.”

  At another time, Jack would have given his usual blithe response to noncombatant guilt: “Don’t feel bad. You didn’t miss a thing. Anyway, at heart we were all 4F—Find them, Feel them, Fuck them, Forget them.”

  But now his dead face just stared straight ahead.

  Officer William centered himself like someone about to give a speech: “The coroner said there was penobarb in your friend’s stomach, as we assumed. Apparently more than thirty pills. She wasn’t fooling around. I checked with the doctor who prescribed them. He treats a bunch of people who work at Warner Brothers. He said that your friend consulted him a couple of weeks ago because she couldn’t sleep. Apparently he hands these things out like Jujubes.”

  For a moment, Jack seemed about to cry again.

  “The coroner didn’t have much to say about the bruise but he did find a small amount of blood inside the mouth.”

  “From what?” I asked.

  “You bite the inside of your mouth while you’re chewing. You have a sudden muscle spasm and your teeth click. Who knows?”

  Jack looked like he wanted to say something but wasn’t physically able.

  “I can understand why you’d want some kind of explanation,” the cop tried to help him. “Nothing more natural than that. I’ve worked for the sheriff’s office for sixteen years and I’ve seen enough unexplained deaths to fill a city cemetery. There’s never an explanation for something like this anyway, not even when there’s an explanation. After a while, you might tell yourself that some blanks just never get filled in because some situations are so random, or so much part of a pattern that we can’t see. And you wouldn’t be dishonoring your friend’s memory by thinking that way.”

  Jack didn’t say anything, and the cop left.

  “Nice of him to come all the way out here to tell us personally,” I said.

  “He was just feeling guilty about the hickey comment,” Jack mumbled, unable to repress his mordancy.

  Officer William came back once more, about four hours later. This time he spoke from the doorway without entering.

  “I got ahold of the coroner and spoke to him directly. He said that the little cut inside her mouth was not some kind of chewing thing. ‘Could have been caused by anything from a fork to a fingernail,’ was how he put it. Further than that he wouldn’t go.”

  Then, seeing the raw pain on Jack’s face, he added, “I’ll keep poking around and let you know if anything turns up.”

  After he left, Jack agreed to get dressed and try to eat something. But he just stared at the egg sandwich I made for him, picking it up and setting it down a couple of times as if assaying its weight before tossing it in the trash. He agreed to go out for a drive only because I told him we could stop at the little restaurant where we’d first taken Val.

  It seemed indecent that it should be one of those great Southern California beach afternoons when the sun is holding back a little but the air is fresh and formations of screeching gulls are riding the updrafts like glider pilots.

  As we drove down the Pacific Coast Highway, I rattled on about things that generally got a rise from Jack—Hedda Hopper’s column that morning in the LA Times implying with spiteful innuendo that Cary Grant and Randolph Scott were more than housemates; a radio report on how Mayor Fletcher Bowron, who had propagandized for packing off California’s Japanese Americans to relocation centers after Pearl Harbor without so much as a sayonara, was now first in line to welcome them back; a letter I’d received the previous day from Bobby, who had joined the Navy late in the war, saying that he was scheduled to get out in a week and he still felt like a “draft dodger” because he hadn’t been in combat.

  Only the last item got a rise out of Jack. “Ah, black Robert,” he said almost inaudibly without looking my way. “Always just a bit too late and now under attack once again b
y his guilty Catholic self.”

  I pulled into the Taste of the Sea parking lot, and Jack made a beeline for the spot where Val had waded into the ocean a few weeks ago. He stood there for a long time staring at the horizon, then slowly returned and slumped down in the front seat as if he’d just finished a ten-mile hike.

  Driving randomly now, I turned on the radio and tried to get him going by joining the Andrews Sisters in “Rum and Coca-Cola” in my best falsetto. But he was dead to me and everything else, so I drove home.

  He plodded toward the house like he was headed to the electric chair, and was about to climb back in bed when I told him he was getting rank and ought to bathe.

  “I know,” he said, picking his shirt off his chest to sniff his body odor. “But right now I still have her smell on me. When I wash it off she’s gone forever.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Temple Rose, who seemed to be plugged into everything, called the next evening to tell us that Val’s funeral was scheduled for the following day, November 9, at the Wee Kirk o’ the Heather at Forest Lawn.

  After we got up, Jack gave in and reluctantly ran a bath. A half hour later he exited the steamy bathroom fully dressed and looking like his ghost.

  His eyes were closed when we drove through the Forest Lawn gates, so he missed the brazen spectacle of the place—lawns as manicured as putting greens, splashing fountains everywhere, and bronzes of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Mark Twain and other secular figures bizarrely mixed in with statuary featuring Marcus Aurelius and Laocoön.

  There were no deciduous trees whose falling leaves might generate somber thoughts. Groundskeepers and other employees wore fixed smiles. Discreet signs directed visitors to burial plots with anodyne names like Eventide, Babyland, and Dawn of Tomorrow.

  Transfiguration was all around us without a sign of Death.

  I knew a little about the Wee Kirk because I had followed newspaper accounts of Jean Harlow’s service when it was held there a few years earlier. Louis B. Mayer himself had directed the funeral ceremony as if it were a feature film, with Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald singing “Indian Love Call” in the climactic scene. Mayer ordered the police to keep fans back until all the celebrities had made their getaway, at which point he let them release the horde of anguished female spectators to rush forward and fight over petals from the commemorative flower displays.